Geraldo: Nixon Wouldn’t Have Had to Resign if he Had a Sean Hannity

The guy who found Al Capone’s vault wishes we had a guy like Sean Hannity back in the Watergate era.

The Hill (“Geraldo Rivera to Hannity: If you were around then Nixon ‘wouldn’t have been forced to resign‘”):

Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera told network host Sean Hannity on Thursday that President Nixon “wouldn’t have been forced to resign” if Hannity were around in his day.

Hannity, a vocal defender of President Trump, opened a segment on his radio show with criticism of what he perceives to be anti-Trump bias in the FBI and Justice Department probes into Russian meddling in the presidential election.

“Nixon never would have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74,” Rivera told Hannity on his radio show.

“It’s too bad for Nixon, because nobody like you existed then. I say that because I believe that our prime responsibility now is to unshackle the 45th president of the United States.”

Rivera is right, of course, if not for the reason he thinks. It may well be that there was no pro-Nixon media figure in the Watergate period that had the clout Hannity has today. But, more to the point, the Republican Party of that era was much less lockstep than today’s version (that’s even more true of the Democrats, who still had a huge Southern contingent well into the 1990s) and, relatedly, there was no alternate mass media for the two parties. Republicans for years charged that the national press had a Democratic bias and there was some truth in that. But everyone was watching Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and David Brinkley, or Harry Reasoner in those days and getting a reasonably balanced take on the news. For 30 minutes a day. Now, it’s possible for Trump supporters to cocoon themselves with pro-Trump conspiracy mongers.

Comments

This is roughly in the category as that time Charles Krauthammer delivered a glowing speech about FOX News in which he described the network as having “created an alternate reality.” What boggles the mind is that, just like Geraldo’s statement about Hannity, he presented this as a compliment.

But then, we live in an age in which the president himself once declared that if he shot someone on 5th avenue he wouldn’t lose any support. In his mind that was a boast, but the implication was underlyingly very cynical: he was effectively calling his supporters mindless cultists who didn’t hold him morally accountable for anything. And what’s notable is that apparently none of his supporters took offense at this comment (thus proving the comment accurate).

What all these examples have in common is the extent to which they reject the concept of moral responsibility in favor of a ruthless Machiavellian ethic where the only thing that matters is what you can get away with.